It Looks Like Motorola's Next Major Smartphone Will Be A Lot Faster Than The Moto X

Lisa Eadicicco, provided by

Published 8:56 am, Friday, August 8, 2014

Motorola's next major smartphone will represent a serious upgrade from the Moto X in terms of hardware, according to a recent leak.

Tech blog PhoneArena spotted some alleged test results for a phone that's believed to be the Moto X+1, which would tell us exactly what's inside Motorola's Moto X successor.

Based on the results, the Moto X+1 is believed to run on a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. This is the same chip found in several of today's high-end smartphones such as the HTC One M8 and LG G3.

More cores in a processor essentially means better multitasking — the more cores a phone has, the more tasks it can handle at a single time. The number of cores doesn't really impact the technical clock speed of a phone, but since it enables a phone to take on more tasks, it can make the overall experience feel smoother.

What's more, the Moto X+1 is expected to feature a full HD 1080p 5.2-inch display, a 12-megapixel main camera and 5-megapixel front camera, with 32GB of storage space.

This suggests the Moto X+1 will be marketed as a true competitor to other flagship Android phones on the market.

The Moto X, compartively, ran on a chip that was already a couple of generations old that only had two cores. It also had a display that was smaller (4.7 inches) and had a lower resolution display (720p) than most other phones at the time.

The Moto X's flagship feature was its Touchless Voice Controls — i.e. its always-listening capabilities that enabled you to ask Google Now a question without even turning the phone's display on. It also came with a chip made by Motorola dedicated to processing your natural language, which means it was able to understand your words a little better than Siri and Google Now on other Android phones.

Based on leaks we've seen, it doesn't seem like the Moto X+1 will have this natural language processor. Instead, it looks like Motorola is upping its hardware quality to take on devices like the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8.

We expect to learn more about the Moto X+1 and Motorola's upcoming Moto 360 smartwatch toward the end of the month.